<USS Avalon> Preventative Hindsight PT4

Preventative Hindsight PT4

A Long Walk off A Short Pier.

-A background log by Leila Criswell

 

 

L-267 hung in space, a practically nameless celestial body in the cold 
blackness of space. It was an ancient place, full of mystery, misery, and dust. 
Everywhere, dust.

Cadet Leila Criswell hated dust. Incidentally, she also hated 
transports--especially transports like the one she was currently confined to.

The SS Antioch, it could be said, had seen better days. Lots of better days. 
Eighty years before, she had been one of the Federation's finest, boldly going 
where no one had gone before. Now, the disheveled vessel puttered around, 
independently owned and operated by a man with a tight budget who called 
himself Slag. Needless to say, the Antioch had not seen a maintenance bay for 
several years. 

Slag, who spent most of his day scratching himself, was a fat Gorn ex-pilot. He 
had been dishonorably discharged from the Gorn space navy for being excessively 
procreative with various female sub-commanders and one generals daughter. He 
also had an elbow problem...he bent it too much, often bringing various 
alcoholic liquids to his gullet for immediate ingestion.

He, along with his brother Sven (oddly enough, Sven is a very popular name 
amongst the Gorn, referring back to the great warrior leader Svendralagomaston 
Char) owned a spare parts yard, Sven usually running the yard while Slag flew 
the few people misfortunate enough to book with him, often times delivering 
them to their intended destination but occasionally not.

This was a 'not' time.

L-267 was not their intended destination, but it was, as Slag put it, a nice 
place to visit all the same. Leila quite disagreed, but Slag didn't care. She 
was just one of twenty eight passengers, all of whom had been sent to him by 
the lowest bidder. They could complain all they wanted. He had a saying: You 
get what you pay for. He also burped a lot, but that doesn't matter. The fact 
was, he couldn't care less. He had brought his passengers to the general 
location of their destination and he needed to take his engines off line for a 
few days to fix them (they were venting drive plasma something fierce, and 
although Slag didn't know what drive plasma was made out of, he was sure it was 
something expensive).

The Antioch was more or less a Federation light cruiser, Constitution-Class. 
She had been stripped of virtually everything resembling Federation technology 
and then sold at auction. She had not had an operational set of warp drive 
nacelles until very recently. Slag, in a drunken haze, had accidentally 'run 
the ship aground', slamming it into an asteroid and smashing the port nacelle. 
So a pair of Klingon K'Tinga-Class warp nacelles had been grafted onto the ship 
haphazardly by Sven, allowing the ship to reach (on a good day) warp 1.9.

This was not a good day either.

Leila stepped away from the window and left her quarters. Slag was in the 
observation lounge, probably drinking himself to death again.

"Mister Slag? When can you take us to our actual destination."

The Gorn have an uncanny degree of abruptness.

"Pformandla?" He mumbled.

"What?"

"When you look not ugly."

"What!"

"You smell. Be gone."

"If I smell, and I highly doubt that I do, it's only because this flea trap of 
a freighter's sonic showers are crap!"

"How for to you get the sonic shower to be working?"

"What?"

"Go away ugly."

"Look. I'll buy a shuttle off you. How much do you want?"


"No have shuttle."

"Well how are we supposed to get off this god-forsaken hunk of crap?"

"NOT CRAP! You take transporters."

"Where are they?"

"In cargo bay."

"We're going to use the cargo transporters?!"

"It be okay. I just narrow confinement beam. Only lose one or two people a 
year." He smiled wickedly.

"That's illegal! You can't do that."

"You want to stay?"

"I'll get my bags."


___________________________________________________________________________

The cargo bay was just as dingy as the rest of the ship, the only light 
emanating from the pathetic excuse for a transporter pad, hovelling in the 
corner like a frightened rabbit on Yimiuk (an obscure Gorn holiday in which 
rabbits are eaten in all fashions, including live and boiled in tomato sauce). 
Leila was not amused. There was a definite difference between the nice, shiny 
pads used for living transport and the dingy, oversized ovals used for 
inanimate transport, but mostly it was internal. Cargo transporters used less 
energy to disassemble the molecules, utilizing a phase-flux device to 
reassemble them at their destination, but the grade at which the reassembling 
took place was far below the standards for living tissue.

In short, using the cargo transporters for humanoid transit was not only 
illegal, but could often be painful and/or fatal. The most common side effects 
were severe headache, difficulty breathing, and vertigo, but death ranked right 
up there. 

Leila felt sick again. Why had she listened to the PADD? Did her destiny really 
mean that much to her, that she was willing to die, or at least suffer a huge 
migraine? What if she never got home?

Who cared? If she didn't do this one thing right now, she would always wonder 
what would have happened. She had to go, even if every bone in her body told 
her not to...even if every bone and her body were about to be scattered across 
the galaxy, she had to go.

And so, she went.

___________________________________________________________________________

 

The average time spent in transporter transit, from initiation to completion, 
is about ten seconds. During that time, the conscious individual is vaguely 
aware of it's surroundings as they change gradually from one place to another. 
Transit via transporter device has been described as a tickling sensation that 
begins at the base of your spine and rapidly engulfs the entire body.

This was not how it felt to be sent by cargo transporter. For almost four 
minutes, Leila existed in limbo, part of her being inside the pattern buffer, 
part of her being somewhere in transit to the surface, and part of her existing 
in the real world.

At first, it felt like a normal transport, the tingling and such taking hold of 
her spine as she was rapidly disassembled. But as time wore on, she began to 
feel disoriented. An itching sensation overwhelmed her, but without hands, she 
couldn't scratch herself. Seconds felt like hours, and the itching slowly 
became a burning. This was not right, it shouldn't burn unless her pattern was 
being lost. She had done extensive studies on various engineering things while 
on Memory Alpha (there wasn't much else to do in your spare time). If things 
were not corrected, she would die. 

Damn you Slag! was what she would have said if it would have done any good.

Then everything became right again. She slowly began to feel normal, until the 
transport was over. As the last swirls of molecules found their proper place, 
she collapsed, intense nausea overwhelming her. For a few minutes she lay on 
the dusty earth in a pool of her own vomit. Realization eventually took hold. 
There were no other people around her. Hers was not the first transport, there 
should be people around...and an outpost...and, but no, there was nothing. Her 
bags were also missing, save the same PADD that had lead her to this location. 
She looked at it.

The blinking curser that had guided her all this way was gone. 

"DAMN IT!" She stomped the now soggy ground with her feet, sloshing up the 
muddy concoction. "DAMN IT ALL TO HELL!"


The ground quivered.

She stopped stomping.

"Oh shit."


The ground disappeared from beneath her feet, taking the dust, the vomit and 
Leila with it. She slid several feet down. For a few minutes, she lay on her 
back listening to the sounds pebbles were making as they rolled down the 
sloping ground. Many of them found time to bounce off her face. 

Today had not been a good day.

Perhaps tomorrow would be better.

Probably not.

After the dust settled (substantially longer than you might think. There was a 
helluva lot of dust!), Leila sat up. 

"WELCOME LEILA."

"What?"

"WELCOME LEILA."

It appeared that the rock face was talking to her. Things were just getting 
better and better.

"Who are you?"

"I AM THE GUARDIAN OF FOREVER."

"....Really?"

"WELCOME."


"Why am I here?"

"TO FIND AND FULFILL YOUR DESTINY."


"What?"


"TO FIND AND FULFI--"

"I heard you already."

The rock face began to glow, and Leila could make out faint images of various 
things. Planets and people, places and things.

"What are you?"

"I AM THE GUARDIAN OF FOREVER."

"The Guardian of Forever is a myth, a Starfleet legend told to cadets and first 
year students."

"INDEED? ARE YOU SURE?"

"Well...I was...until you did that whole indeed thing. I mean, a talking rock 
face is kinda weird, especially one that can program PADDS and rig transporters 
and such."

"YOU DID THAT YOURSELF."


"Huh?"


"YOU DID THAT YOURSELF, OR YOU WILL DO THAT YOURSELF. IN MY VIEW, YOU ALREADY 
HAVE DONE IT A THOUSAND TIMES."

"Oh please don't tell me i have to do it that many times. I do have a life."

"PERHAPS."


"What do you want me to do here."

"PASS THROUGH MY PORTAL AND REPAIR THE PAST."

"Why?"


"BECAUSE IT IS NECCESSARY. IF YOU DO NOT, THEN A GREAT MANY THINGS THAT HAVE 
ALREADY GONE WRONG WILL GO WRONG."

"What does that mean."

"I AM A KEEPER OF TIME. YOU MUST DO THIS. I WILL TELL YOU HOW. WILL YOU PASS 
THROUGH MY PORTAL?"

"Why the hell not?"

"THEN, LEILA CRISWELL, LISTEN WELL. MARK AND REMEMBER MY WORDS."

And the Guardian spoke, minutes turning to hours, history unfolding before 
Leila's eyes. Using the portal, the Guardian showed her a great many things. 
The Duryllium filament had cause a plethora of problems, history was peppered 
with it's interference. When it was done, the Guardian was silent.

"Is that all?"

"HAVE YOU ANY QUESTIONS?"

"Aside from the one I just asked? You do know this is completely insane, don't 
you?"

"THE FUTURE OF THE PAST LIES IN YOUR HANDS. DO NOT FAIL."

"Since you know how everything ends, can you tell me if I fail."

"DO NOT FAIL."

Leila perked an eyebrow, took a deep breath, straitened her hair and looked at 
the guardian.

The misty yellow portal was swirling, taking the form of the time she was to 
travel to. 

"When do I go?"

The portal displayed an engineering area of some sort. There were two men 
talking, one walked away. Lights were flashing. It was ambiguous at best.

"PASS THROUGH NOW."

Leila shrugged.

"Well and why not?"

 

 



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